Billy Corgan 2019-06-17: Difference between revisions

BC: Thank you very much, thank you.  As some of you know, I grew up in a very strange circumstance where my mother and father had me when they were 19.  And then my parents split up, my father took my brother out of the country and I was left with my mother who had some serious issues, was institutionalized in a mental hospital and I never lived with my mother after that, I went to live with my great-grandmother, who was born in Belgium.  Barely spoke English, but treated me better than anyone ever treated my life and I had this idyllic year at four years old of being in my great-grandmother Martha’s care with my grandfather, her son, my mother’s father.  And...I didn’t hear from my father for a year or so and one day he just showed up and said, “Come with me,” and...I found myself living in a motor home, which if you know what that is, it’s like a trailer with wheels.  And he was remarried and then suddenly I was in this new family, my brother who had left when he was quite young didn’t know who I was.  The first day I was there, my brother leapt on me like a panther and bit a chunk out of my back that day and that was my start of that journey.  My father was incarcerated multiple times and when I was about 11, he got into really serious trouble and went into jail at the time for, I believe it was 12 years.  He was able to somehow wrangle himself out of the situation, I won’t say how, you’ll have to read the book for that one.  Let’s just say it wasn’t legal.  And uh, and at some point in that maelstrom--before he went to jail--my brother Jesse was born.  And he was born--at first, we thought he was like every other baby, and we quickly realized...that he wasn’t healthy.  He had open heart surgery when he was like maybe six months old.  And uh, he had a rare chromosomal disorder which is related to [[w:Down syndrome|Down syndrome]], but is a different pair of chromosomes and at the time that he was born in nineteen...seventy-seven or something like that, there was only 100 reported cases in the entire world, so they didn’t really know what my brother’s situation was, but we were told very early on that he would never walk, talk or um--and that basically we should put him in a state home and he would literally be...you know, just throw him away.  To my stepmother’s credit, she refused to do that and we raised him as best we could with every benefit of older brothers.  My mother’s--stepmother’s great story is the day that we used him for a [[w:Baseball_field#Bases_and_baselines|base]].  It was second base.  We, heh...she makes it sound very dramatic, but when we got to second base, we just had to touch his head.  We weren’t stepping on him and he had quite a big Afro.  My brother was one of the first generation of--and I use this word loosely--disabled people in America to engage in a program called--I think they called it mainlining or streamlining--where he was put into quote unquote normal classes.  So at 16 years old, he was fully confronted not only with his disability, but the fact that he wasn’t like all the other kids.  And uh, my response to that was give him the [[w:Metallica|Metallica]] [[w:Metallica_(album)|Black Album]].  And I will say my brother is a vicious metal fan.  With incredibly good taste there.